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ใช้ Gentoo

Michael Rayment, MUN: Computer Department at University of Newfoundland Switches to Gentoo

Michael Rayment, the system administrator at Canada's Memorial University of Newfoundland who decided to put Gentoo on every single desktop and server in the house, sent us an account of his motivations for moving to Gentoo that was so convincing we decided to publish it verbatim:

Background

First I should provide a little background. I work as a system administrator at a moderate sized university providing computing support for the student computer labs across campus. In total my group provides support for about 800 client workstations some of which are part of a Beowulf cluster, others are Linux only and some are dual boot (Linux/Win98). One common feature is that they are all booting Linux disklessly using an internal boot prom (PXE or Etherboot). All the client workstations get their Linux software from one of 15 application servers that each have identical copies of the Linux software. Only the kernels are customized to run on their respective hardware. The lowest end computers are AMD 266's but most of the computers are in the 600 to 2800 megahertz range. It is quite remarkable that such a wide range of computers can run from a single image but what a difference it makes to managing those systems. Within minutes we can rsync the latest modifications out to our 15 application servers and immediately the software is available to our 800 clients. Over the years we have based our image on Slackware, Debian, Mandrake and Redhat.

Making the Plunge

Until quite recently we were running Redhat 7.2 heavily modified and patched to keep up-to-date with the latest security patches and some newer versions of applications. You might wonder why we are still running Redhat 7.2 instead of the latest and greatest. Well the reason is that invariably things break and packages are missing or don't work after a major upgrade. In short the users get upset and therefore we take a lot of time checking the new distribution before inflicting it on our users. Also we have to munge the distribution to get it to play well in the diskless environment. Putting out a new distribution is therefore something that we don't take lightly and don't do at the drop of the hat. However the applications and libraries are getting old and are in need of a refresh so we began looking at alternatives last summer.

Our first task was to come up with a list of what we wanted from our new distribution. At the top of our wish list was a distribution that:

would evolve gradually over time and not go though completely "new" distributions every year.
would be comprehensive so that we would not have to go out to other sources and get missing applications and deal with inevitable incompatibilities.
would be able to gracefully deal with package dependencies so we don't have to hunt around on the net for particular packages that are required to get an application going.
would be highly configurable and allow for the easy customization of software to fit into our environment.
would provide access to the source code actually running on our systems.
would play well in a diskless environment.
At the end of the day Gentoo won out on all counts. Gentoo provides an incredible utility called emerge that is able to keep our image up-to-date without inflicting our user community with traumatic change. Changes in one package here or there, following an emerge -u world, is much easier to handle and test than the installation of a completely new distribution. We were amazed at the 6000 odd packages (I didn't bother to count) that are supported under the Gentoo distribution. Most of the software that we have accumulated over the years was available through a simple emerge command. I really enjoyed the way Gentoo dealt with software dependencies. Under our Redhat distribution sometimes we would have to hunt down packages in order to get an application up and running. With Gentoo it lists the dependencies and, at the installers request, proceeds to download, compile and install all the dependencies along with the application. Another feature of Gentoo is that it is a source distribution and so all the sources are readily available in a compact form that can be easily be expanded and viewed for debugging purposes. Since the conversion of sources to binary is accomplished through the use of ebuild scripts, it is possible to control the way your system compiles and where the various package components are installed.

Finally and most importantly I was pleased that Gentoo played well with our diskless environment. One thing that made converting to a diskless environment easy was the ability to have named run levels. This allows us to start up computers running different services by passing an argument to the kernel at boot time. For each of our specialized environments (eg. dual boot computers, single boot computers, Beowulf systems, firewalls, dial up ISP computers and kiosk computers), the symlinks to the specific start up scripts are simply placed into an appropriately named directory and the diskless client then takes on the requested functions based on the boot up parameter. Another thing I liked was the way that you could fake the start up of a particular component of the run time start up sequence. This is important when booting disklessly as things like the network services are already configured before init even starts.

Where We Are

We have just started the roll out of Gentoo into our lab environment. We are currently running a modified Gentoo image on a few computers in one of our Computer Science labs and will turn more on as we work out the wrinkles. We will soon be starting to build our master Gentoo server that will sync out software to the application servers. As we switch one lab from Redhat to Gentoo we will simply point the labs application server to the Gentoo master sync server. It will probably take a month or two to complete the switch over depending on how busy we are and how many problems we run into. Again we like to make sure things are working well before inflicting change on our users.

Comments

As to whether Gentoo is the distribution for you, well that depends on a number of things. As you can well imagine we have a lot of experience with Unix and Linux and we also like to do unusual things with our computers. Gentoo is ideal for this kind of situation. The portage system does make things very smooth so I can certainly see neophytes being able to install a Gentoo system without much effort but for the guy who just wants to turn on the computer and have it work then I can see a real advantage in the traditional binary distribution. One of the big advantages of Linux is that there are multiple ways to set up your computer. Hopefully there will be a way, whether it be Redhat or Gentoo, that meets everyones needs so that some day most people will actually choose Linux over Microsoft when selecting an OS.

My other hope is that there will be greater support for running Linux in a diskless environment. What is needed is a standard way of doing Linux disklessly so that software developers can write their software in such a way as to facilitate the running of their applications in a diskless environment. The /dev file system and /dev/shm have certainly gone a long way towards facilitating the diskless transition. The adoption of the /var as the directory of choice for applications to write to, has made the task quite easy but occasionally some applications still do something that messes up. But from a systems management point of view going diskless is worth the effort. It offers truly distributed computing with truly centralized management control and it is something that Microsoft does not offer. It is therefore something that the Linux world should promote.

from
http://www.gentoo.org/news/en/gwn/20040209-newsletter.xml [addsig]